Think of Godin as an anti–Elon Musk and this seemingly lightweight book suddenly acquires a lot of heft.
Offbeat business leadership manifesto that often morphs into a prose poem.
Godin, author of many bestsellers, including Tribes, Poke the Box, and This Is Marketing, begins with a provocation: “If you’ve been paying any attention at all, you already know: work isn’t working.” Bosses are burned out, workers too, and everyone hates being evaluated as if a machine. “Humans are not a resource,” he writes. “We are not a tool.” If you’re running a fast-food outlet or making widgets, notes the author, you may be inclined to keep things as they are since the objective is to produce and sell as much as you can at the lowest possible cost. But burgers and widgets do not innovations make, and in the longer view, they don’t materially add to the advancement of human civilization or constitute anything approaching “significant work.” Nor, in the end, do most Zoom meetings, metrics of how many hits an article gets online, or time-motion studies that include how many minutes an employee spends in the bathroom each day. If you want to get to the significant stuff—in Godin’s repeated but nicely alliterative mantra “Mozart, not Muzak”—then a boss must stop being merely a boss and be a leader. That involves an entirely different way of thinking and being, a mindset that measures how healthy and happy the people inside an organization are and, in turn, how healthy and happy the organization is. Godin’s staccato, sententious style (“Until our existential needs are met, it’s difficult to produce the emotional labor needed for progress and possibility”) may be a little jarring to readers accustomed to graphs and charts and other business-book appurtenances, but there’s a lot of substance underlying the piece on better employer-employee relations and arriving at common, humane goals.
Think of Godin as an anti–Elon Musk and this seemingly lightweight book suddenly acquires a lot of heft.Pub Date: May 30, 2023
ISBN: 9780593715543
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Portfolio
Review Posted Online: April 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
IN THE NEWS
A passionate and accessible guide to humanizing the workplace.
Helbig and Norman present a game plan for making leadership more responsively human.
In this expanded update to The Psychological Safety Playbook: Lead More Powerfully by Being More Human (2023), the authors provide “practical strategies for responding to resistance, sparking change, embodying the change we want to see, and moving forward deliberately,” specifically in a business setting. They suggest ways to encourage what they call “changemakers” through the use of five key “plays” from their playbook: Communicate Courageously, Master the Art of Listening, Manage Your Reactions (“shift from automatic reaction to conscious response to stay better connected to yourself and others”), Embrace Risk and Failure, and Design Inclusive Rituals. The goal is to ensure that organizational cultures promote psychological safety, guided by leaders who “walk the talk” by emphasizing their own humanity at every turn. (“We must be the first to share our own failures with our teams, which will start to make it possible for others to do the same.”) This call for example-setting is sounded throughout the book as Helbig and Norman urge their target audience (leaders and would-be leaders) to go beyond mere instruction and instead embody the qualities they want to see in their subordinates, such as continuous learning, active curiosity, and self-reflection. Each chapter includes a detailed “Recommended Reading” section and text with extensive numbered and bulleted points formatted to make the core concepts more immediately digestible. The authors effectively employ clear and empathetic prose to assure readers that psychological safety is slow to build and quick to break, observing that such safety requires steady attention and delivers outsize payoffs as a result. They refreshingly ground a great deal of the material in psychology and neuroscience, pointing out, for instance, that research has demonstrated that the parasympathetic nervous system responds to honest appreciation, which improves creative thinking. Some wistful readers might consider some of the authors’ suggestions beyond the reach of their own organizations, as when group facilitators are advised to “gently intervene when someone dominates the conversation,” but hope springs eternal.
A passionate and accessible guide to humanizing the workplace.Pub Date: May 19, 2026
ISBN: 9798993550503
Page Count: 170
Publisher: Crazy Idea Press
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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